The Power of the Collection Habit

THERE'S MUCH MORE to these simple techniques and models than may appear at first glance. Indeed, they offer a systematic method to keep your mind distraction-free, ensuring a high level of efficiency and effectiveness in your work. That in itself would be sufficient reason to implement these practices.

But there are even greater implications for the fundamental principles at work here. What follows in the next three chapters is an accounting of my experience, over the last twenty years, of the subtler and often more profound effects that can transpire from the implementation of these basic principles. The longer-term results can have a significant impact on you as an individual, and they can positively affect larger organizational cultures as well.

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When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete or unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both personally and professionally.

The Personal Benefit

When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you'll discover, as I did, the way to get rid of them. And if you experienced any positive feelings from collecting your stuff, you actually began the process of eliminating the negativity yourself.

The Source of the Negative Feelings The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn't come from having too much to do; it's the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.

If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.

Don't Make the Agreement

It probably felt pretty good to take a bunch of your old stuff, decide that you weren't going to do anything with it, and just toss it into the trash. One way to handle an incompletion in your world is to just say no!

I doubt you're going to lower your standards. But once you really understand what it means, you'll probably make fewer agreements. I know I did. I used to make a lot of them, just to win people's approval. When I realized the price I was paying on the back end for not keeping those agreements, I became a lot more conscious about the ones I made. One insurance executive I worked with described the major benefit he derived from implementing this system: "Previously I would just tell everyone, 'Sure, I'll do it,' because I didn't know how much I really had to do. Now that I've got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity I have had to say, 'No, I can't do that, I'm sorry.' The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed by my discipline!"Another client, an entrepreneur in the personal coaching business, recently told me that making an inventory of his work had eliminated a huge amount of worry and stress from his life. The discipline of putting everything he had his attention on into his in-basket caused him to reconsider what he really wanted to do anything about. If he wasn't willing to toss a note about it into "in," he just let it go!

Maintaining an objective inventory of your work makes it much easier to say no with integrity.

Complete the Agreement

Of course, another way to get rid of the negative feelings about your stuff is to just finish it and be able to mark it off as done. You actually love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you've completed something. If you've begun to complete less-than-two-minute actions as they surface in your life, I'm sure you can attest to the psychological benefit. Most of my clients feel fantastic after just a couple of hours of processing their piles, just because of how many things they accomplish using the two-minute rule.

Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done.

One of your better weekends may be spent just finishing up a lot of little errands and tasks that have accumulated around your house and in your personal life. Invariably when you capture all the open loops, little and big, and see them on a list in front of you, some part of you will be inspired (or creatively disgusted or intimidated enough) to go knock them off the list.

We all seem to be starved for a win. It's great to satisfy that by giving yourself doable tasks you can start and finish easily.

It's a lot easier to complete agreements when you know what they are.

So, since you're not going to significantly lower your standards, or stop creating more things to do, you'd better get comfortable with the third option, if you want to keep from stressing yourself out.

Renegotiate Your Agreement

It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all.

The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at the same time.

3. At least put "Clean garage" on a "Someday/Maybe" list. Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, "Not this week." The next time you walk by your garage, you won't hear a thing internally, other than "Ha! Not this week."The Radical Departure from Traditional Time Management In my experience, anything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

You'll feel better collecting anything that you haven't collected yet. When you say to yourself, "Oh, that's right, I need to get butter next time I'm at the store," and you write it on your grocery list, you'll feel better. When you remember, "I've got to call my banker about the trust fund," and you write that down someplace where you know you'll see it when you're at a phone, you'll feel better. But there will be a light-year's difference when you know you have it all.

This doesn't mean that your mind will be empty. If you're conscious, your mind will always be focusing on something. But if it's focusing on only one thing at a time, without distraction, you'll be in your "zone."I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist. To fully realize that more productive place, you will need to capture it all. It takes focus and a change of habit to train yourself to recognize and download even the smallest agreements with yourself as they're created in your mind. Doing the collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behavior of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering and productive.

When Relationships and Organizations Have the Collection Habit But if communication gaps are still an issue, there's likely some layer of frustration and a general nervousness in the culture. Most people feel that without constant baby-sitting and handholding, things could disappear in the system and then blow up at any time. They don't realize that they're feeling this because they've been in this situation so consistently that they relate to it as if it were a permanent law, like gravity. It doesn't have to be that way.

I have noticed this for years. Good people who haven't incorporated these behaviors come into my environment, and they stick out like a sore thumb. I've lived with the standards of clear psychic RAM and hard, clean edges on in-baskets for more than two decades now. When a note sits idle in someone's in-basket unprocessed, or when he or she nods "yes, I will" in a conversation but doesn't write anything down, my "uh-oh" bell rings. This is unacceptable behavior in my world. There are much bigger fish to fry than worrying about leaks in the system.

I need to trust that any request or relevant information I put on a voice-mail, in an e-mail, in a conversation, or in a written note will get into the other person's system and that it will be processed and organized, soon, and available for his or her review as an option for action. If the recipient is managing voice-mails but not e-mail and paper, I have now been hamstrung to use only his or her trusted medium. That should be unacceptable behavior in any organization that cares about whether things happen with the least amount of effort.

Bailing water in a leaky boat diverts energy from rowing the boat.

When change is required, there must be trust that the initiatives for that change will be dealt with appropriately. Any intact system will ultimately be only as good as its weakest link, and often that Achilles' heel is a key person's dulled responsiveness to communications in the system.

I especially notice this when I walk around organizations where in-baskets are either nonexistent, or overflowing and obviously long unprocessed. These cultures usually suffer from serious "interruptitis" because they can't trust putting communications into the system.

Unfortunately, you can't legislate personal systems. Everyone must have his or her own way to deal with what he or she has to deal with. You can, however, hold people accountable for outcomes, and for tracking and managing everything that comes their way. And you can give them the information in this book. Then, at least, they'll have no excuse for letting something fall through the cracks.

Organizations must create a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than he or she can do, and in which it is sage to renegotiate agreements about what everyone is not doing.

This doesn't mean that everyone has to do everything. I hope I have described a way to relate to our relatively new knowledge-based world that gives room for everyone to have a lot more to do than he or she can do. The critical issue will be to facilitate a constant renegotiation process with all involved, so they feel OK about what they're not doing. That's real knowledge work, at a more sophisticated level. But there's little hope of getting there without having bulletproof collection systems in play. Remember, you can't renegotiate an agreement with yourself that you can't remember you made. And you certainly can't renegotiate agreements with others that you've lost track of.

When groups of people collectively adopt the 100 percent collection standard, they have a tight ship to sail. It doesn't mean they're sailing in the right direction, or even that they're on the right ship; it just means that the one they're on, in the direction it's going, is doing that with the most efficient energy it can.